The CEOs of AT&T and Time Warner defended their proposed $85 billion merger to lawmakers, trying to navigate a tricky political landscape in which President-elect Donald Trump has expressed hostility to the deal.

Syrian rebels in Aleppo called for a cease-fire to evacuate civilians and the severely wounded from neighborhoods they still control—a tacit admission the opposition has been all but defeated in a crucial battle. Rebels estimate that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their allies now hold 60% of the territory in the city that the opposition controlled just over a week ago.60

Shell said it had signed an agreement with Iran’s state oil company to explore future projects, signaling that giant energy companies are unlikely to be deterred by President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to undo the Iran nuclear deal.

On the campaign trail Donald Trump promised “coal is coming back,” but the experience of Consol Energy suggests some businesses have already made up their mind about coal. The company has in recent years become a natural-gas producer.

Banks in Switzerland once offered a teenager-to-retirement career path. That is no longer the case, as heightened regulations, ultralow interest rates and a tech industry competing for talent have upended the profession.

Merrill Lynch will require its brokers to make at least two client referrals to other parts of parent Bank of America next year to avoid a cut in pay, a tweak to how the bank compensates its more than 14,000 brokers.

Complaints to the city about the warehouse that caught fire killing 36 people, and its adjoining lot, stretch back to 1987, but no city building inspector had been inside the Ghost Ship in the past 30 years.

Metro Money

Art

Christie’s top contemporary-art executive is stepping down. Brett Gorvy, the longtime chairman and international head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art, is leaving the auction house to be a private art dealer.